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ACTS OF RELIGION

himself or another, and, in this case, from Jean Genet. It is with such a quotation (within invisible quotations marks as well, then) that Derrida ends this final paragraph of "Faith and Knowledge." Derrida quotes Genet: "'One of the questions that I will not avoid, une des questions que je n'éviterai pas, is the question of religion.'"


Of course, in some respects Abraham does speak. He says a lot. But even if he says everything, he need only keep silent on a single thing for one to conclude that he hasn't spoken.

—Jacques Derrida69


Part of what Derrida would have wanted to say, then, was perhaps not to speak but to quote, to recall and quote an assertion of non -avoidance. This assertion, which Derrida himself did not speak but did write and quote, recalls and implicates not only Derrida's own discussions of avoidance, but also the distinct and related issues of his re-deployment of the languages of other religious traditions, of the questions of negative theology/ies, issues to which Derrida himself has often returned, and upon which discussions of his work have tended to focus. Here also, interpretations at war, Derrida re-cites Genet ("For the first time I am afraid, while writing, as they say, 'on' someone, of being read by him. Not to arrest him, not to draw him back, not to bridle him. Yesterday he let me know that he was in Beirut, among the Palestinians at war, encircled outcasts. I know that what interests me always takes (its/his) place over there, but how to show that?").70 Derrida introduces again his text on religion, and does so in a text that he had previously introduced by citing Hegel, with whom "Faith and Knowledge" began. Had he said what he would have wanted to say, Derrida would have thus also recalled and recited-as he did in the preceding sections—Glas, Glauben und Wissen, as well as, "Interpretations at War," Immanuel Kant, Henri Bergson, and Hermann Cohen, "the Jew, the German," and Jean Genet. Still, by going to Capri, Derrida certainly may have wanted to say, to recite and repeat that he, or another, will have been bound by a promise, an affirmation



69. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 59.

70. Jacques Derrida, Glas, 36/F50. On Derrida and Genet, see Abdelkebir Khatibi, "Ultime dissidence de Genet," Figures de l'etranger dans La Litterature franraise (Paris: Denoël, 1987) 129-200; Ian H. Magedera, "Seing Genet, Citation and Mourning; a propos Glas by Jacques Derrida," Paragraph 21 (March 1998) 28-44; and Jane Marie Todd, "Autobiography and the Case of the Signature: Reading Derrida's Glas;' Comparative Literature 38: 1 (winter 1986) 1-19.


Jacques Derrida - Acts of Religion